Custom and Myth

Page: 40

The conclusion appears to be that the central part of the Jason myth
is incapable of being explained, either as a nature-myth, or as a myth
founded on a disease of language. So many languages could not
take the same malady in the same way; nor can we imagine any series
of natural phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many
diverse races.

We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented
the same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men
spread from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story,
once invented, has drifted all round the world. If the last theory
be approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell found lately
in the Polish bone-cave, {102a}
or like the Egyptian beads discovered in the soil of Dahomey.
The story will have been carried hither and thither, in the remotest
times, to the remotest shores, by traders, by slaves, by captives in
war, or by women torn from their own tribe and forcibly settled as wives
among alien peoples.

Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers
and grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the
law of exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the
same stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must
have been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife,
as often happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably
bring the hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange
speech. By all these agencies, working through dateless time,
we may account for the diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of
tales like the central arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason.
{102b}

Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered
the darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with
a mouse? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest
calls on him in the ‘Iliad’ (i. 39), might be rendered ‘Mouse
Apollo,’ or ‘Apollo, Lord of Mice.’ As we shall
see later, mice lived beneath the altar, and were fed in the holy of
holies of the god, and an image of a mouse was placed beside or upon
his sacred tripod. The ancients were puzzled by these things,
and, as will be shown, accounted for them by ‘mouse-stories,’
Σμινθιακοι λοyοι,
so styled by Eustathius, the mediæval interpreter of Homer.
Following our usual method, let us ask whether similar phenomena occur
elsewhere, in countries where they are intelligible. Did insignificant
animals elsewhere receive worship: were their effigies elsewhere placed
in the temples of a purer creed? We find answers in the history
of Peruvian religion.

After the Spanish conquest of Peru, one of the European adventurers,
Don Garcilasso de la Vega, married an Inca princess. Their son,
also named Garcilasso, was born about 1540. His famous book, ‘Commentarias
Reales,’ contains the most authentic account of the old Peruvian
beliefs. Garcilasso was learned in all the learning of the Europeans,
and, as an Inca on the mother’s side, had claims on the loyalty
of the defeated race. He set himself diligently to collect both
their priestly and popular traditions, and his account of them is the
more trustworthy as it coincides with what we know to have been true
in lands with which Garcilasso had little acquaintance.